Statement RE: Saving Bannister Home Made 24 June 2009
Here is the statement I made at the meeting at Brown on saving Bannister's Home
Edward Mitchell Bannister Lived at 93 Benevolent Street
You sit here now. The house where your family lived when you were born has been torn down. The house you grew up in has been torn down; the first place you lived after college has been torn down; the place you lived in when you first married has been torn down. We shall all live to be at least 100 years old, but ten years after we die, the home we last inhabited will be torn down.
You are many things – character and personality and the sum of all you beheld, the influence of all who nurtured you. But can you really tell me that there is not a dimension of who you are that is defined by a sense of place? Every one of us can recite the addresses of homes in which we have lived - - maybe even the phone numbers.
Those tricks of memory are connected to the human regard for a sense of place. In the arts, Rembrandt’s very name, van Rijn, locates him in a place, as was the custom of that day. We go to the homes and studios, to stand in the place, to be within the walls, to see what Vermeer or Picasso saw, to see where Monet worked. We go to Giverny to see the gardens he created and painted, to see the kitchen table where he took his coffee. In this country we go to Chesterwood, to Cornish, New Hampshire, to Olana, for many reasons, among them because those are places where, in the arts, greatness dwelt. And we enjoy there a sense of connection to and indeed a deeper understanding of the lives and inspiration and work of the artists who inhabited those spaces.
Why does Edward Bannister deserve less? Why do we as a nation, or Providence as a city, deprive ourselves of the opportunity to claim this man’s greatness in a way that is not abstract and ephemeral? Edward Mitchell Bannister was a great man, an important man, a man of extraordinary talent, ability and achievement. And beyond that he was married to Christiana Carteaux, a woman of uncommon talent, accomplishment and purpose in her own right. They spent 14 years -- fourteen of their most productive years, living at 93 Benevolent Street. He kept a studio elsewhere, but Edward Bannister lived, and thought, and sketched, and entertained, and daydreamed, and argued, and planned, and slept with his wife, or not - - they had a complex relationship, and straightened the pictures on the walls, and chatted with neighbors, in that house.
Across the street from Bannister’s home, and a block away at 110 Benevolent Street, Senator Nelson Aldrich lived. The desk is there in that building at which he drafted the Federal Reserve Act. That affects all of our lives today. And a big sign hangs outside that house proclaiming it the Rhode Island Historical Society at the Aldrich House.
At 93 Benevolent Street Edward Bannister rose up in the morning, walked though the rooms of his home, sat in the evenings and thought long and hard about painting Sabin Point, Narragansett Bay, and The Mill in Knightsville and Leucothea Rescuing Ulysses, and about A Man on Horseback And A Woman on Foot Driving Cattle. He thought about Oxen Hauling Rails, and Fort Dumpling at Jamestown, and a Street Scene in downtown Boston. And he made notes and drew sketches and thought about color and pigment and brushstroke and history and human interaction; about the beauty of the beasts of burden, the power and mystery of their presence in our world, and he thought about the people and the faces he set out to paint, about what they showed of lives lived and about how those lives can be enshrined on canvas.
African American art history is a kaleidoscope. Brilliant light, colors, visions swirling around, and there is an abundance of greatness there. We ooh and ahh, we celebrate, but we are not yet at the point of sustained close analysis of much of the work, its history, the very brushstrokes, the lives, the influences and conversations of most black American artists. We do not yet have the deep research, the catalogues raisonnee; the published presentations of bodies of work that establish stature beyond dispute; all the things that place an artist securely in the national and international canon, matters of race and gender aside. We are not there in part because as a nation we have yet to grasp the significance of the fullness of those lives, their histories, their careers including the meaning and cultural value of where they lived, where they worked.
One man on Benevolent Street wrote on paper and did many other things, fine and otherwise, always human, often political, that left him financially well off and garnered respect. Another man, a block away, drew on paper, painted on paper and on canvas, built a career that left him financially comfortable and made it possible for him to live his life as an artist. And he left a legacy to this nation as well. One that we understand less well than that of the politician Nelson Aldrich because the papers have not been gathered, the essays and books have yet to be written. Edward Bannister’s house has not been honored as a site where greatness dwelt and where inspiration remains in the shadows and the cobwebs and the crumbling walls and ceilings and floors.
These are bad times financially. And so the challenge is even greater. The challenge is to ask ourselves why, of those two houses, one should stand and the other should deteriorate? And depending upon your answer to that question, what are you going to do about it?
Edward Mitchell Bannister Lived at 93 Benevolent Street
You sit here now. The house where your family lived when you were born has been torn down. The house you grew up in has been torn down; the first place you lived after college has been torn down; the place you lived in when you first married has been torn down. We shall all live to be at least 100 years old, but ten years after we die, the home we last inhabited will be torn down.
You are many things – character and personality and the sum of all you beheld, the influence of all who nurtured you. But can you really tell me that there is not a dimension of who you are that is defined by a sense of place? Every one of us can recite the addresses of homes in which we have lived - - maybe even the phone numbers.
Those tricks of memory are connected to the human regard for a sense of place. In the arts, Rembrandt’s very name, van Rijn, locates him in a place, as was the custom of that day. We go to the homes and studios, to stand in the place, to be within the walls, to see what Vermeer or Picasso saw, to see where Monet worked. We go to Giverny to see the gardens he created and painted, to see the kitchen table where he took his coffee. In this country we go to Chesterwood, to Cornish, New Hampshire, to Olana, for many reasons, among them because those are places where, in the arts, greatness dwelt. And we enjoy there a sense of connection to and indeed a deeper understanding of the lives and inspiration and work of the artists who inhabited those spaces.
Why does Edward Bannister deserve less? Why do we as a nation, or Providence as a city, deprive ourselves of the opportunity to claim this man’s greatness in a way that is not abstract and ephemeral? Edward Mitchell Bannister was a great man, an important man, a man of extraordinary talent, ability and achievement. And beyond that he was married to Christiana Carteaux, a woman of uncommon talent, accomplishment and purpose in her own right. They spent 14 years -- fourteen of their most productive years, living at 93 Benevolent Street. He kept a studio elsewhere, but Edward Bannister lived, and thought, and sketched, and entertained, and daydreamed, and argued, and planned, and slept with his wife, or not - - they had a complex relationship, and straightened the pictures on the walls, and chatted with neighbors, in that house.
Across the street from Bannister’s home, and a block away at 110 Benevolent Street, Senator Nelson Aldrich lived. The desk is there in that building at which he drafted the Federal Reserve Act. That affects all of our lives today. And a big sign hangs outside that house proclaiming it the Rhode Island Historical Society at the Aldrich House.
At 93 Benevolent Street Edward Bannister rose up in the morning, walked though the rooms of his home, sat in the evenings and thought long and hard about painting Sabin Point, Narragansett Bay, and The Mill in Knightsville and Leucothea Rescuing Ulysses, and about A Man on Horseback And A Woman on Foot Driving Cattle. He thought about Oxen Hauling Rails, and Fort Dumpling at Jamestown, and a Street Scene in downtown Boston. And he made notes and drew sketches and thought about color and pigment and brushstroke and history and human interaction; about the beauty of the beasts of burden, the power and mystery of their presence in our world, and he thought about the people and the faces he set out to paint, about what they showed of lives lived and about how those lives can be enshrined on canvas.
African American art history is a kaleidoscope. Brilliant light, colors, visions swirling around, and there is an abundance of greatness there. We ooh and ahh, we celebrate, but we are not yet at the point of sustained close analysis of much of the work, its history, the very brushstrokes, the lives, the influences and conversations of most black American artists. We do not yet have the deep research, the catalogues raisonnee; the published presentations of bodies of work that establish stature beyond dispute; all the things that place an artist securely in the national and international canon, matters of race and gender aside. We are not there in part because as a nation we have yet to grasp the significance of the fullness of those lives, their histories, their careers including the meaning and cultural value of where they lived, where they worked.
One man on Benevolent Street wrote on paper and did many other things, fine and otherwise, always human, often political, that left him financially well off and garnered respect. Another man, a block away, drew on paper, painted on paper and on canvas, built a career that left him financially comfortable and made it possible for him to live his life as an artist. And he left a legacy to this nation as well. One that we understand less well than that of the politician Nelson Aldrich because the papers have not been gathered, the essays and books have yet to be written. Edward Bannister’s house has not been honored as a site where greatness dwelt and where inspiration remains in the shadows and the cobwebs and the crumbling walls and ceilings and floors.
These are bad times financially. And so the challenge is even greater. The challenge is to ask ourselves why, of those two houses, one should stand and the other should deteriorate? And depending upon your answer to that question, what are you going to do about it?
Add a Comment
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Comment by Marilyn Richardson on June 30, 2009 at 11:03am - Thanks for your message. The meeting with a group of Brown administrators went pretty well. The house is now officially returned to Brown, they will work to combat further deterioration, and we'll meet again in September.
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Comment by Heather Cole on June 30, 2009 at 10:14am - Very well said. What was the response?
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© 2009 Created by Joanne Riley
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